


Million Dollar Man

by Tinkernat



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Introspection, Post-SPECTRE
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-19
Updated: 2017-11-19
Packaged: 2019-02-04 09:35:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12768147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tinkernat/pseuds/Tinkernat
Summary: Madeleine and James's relationship is going perfectly until reality (and SPECTRE) decides to remind them who they really are.





	Million Dollar Man

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't done anything in quite this style before, so would appreciate any feedback - and I do mean any! Had a bit of trouble with characterisation and tense so if you see any glaring errors please point them out!

Madeleine sits sometimes and wonders when it came to this.

They have a lovely Georgian house in a nice street. The furniture is plush, the ceilings high, the atmosphere airy and it’s quiet and relaxing in a way she hasn’t known for a long time. Not since her mother and their quiet games in the front room, while her father worked in the next. The street hums with a sedate bustle outside the bay windows, day or night. She loves the way it lulls her to sleep, even on her restless nights when all she can remember is the echo of the gunshot that killed her father and the ache of not knowing.

She hated her father, but dear God did she love him too.

Neither of them works. He’s got money from MI6; his pension fund he’d once joked. Compensation for the work he’d done, the ache of barely healed injuries that seeped down to his bones and the irrevocable way it had fucked up his mind. She’s still got all her savings from the clinic, where flashy spending meant leaving a print and prints meant being followed.

She loves that they can up sticks from the street they’ve entrenched themselves in and go anywhere. A plane ticket costs nothing to them. With a few taps of computer keys, they have the world at their fingertips. She loves how the ice in his eyes burns when they step out somewhere new and he catches her up in his whirlwind. She loves the heat of his lips on hers, on her neck, her body, her soul, it seems. She doesn’t just play with fire, she craves it.

She remembers looking at him, strong, glorious and rose-tinted around the edges, and thinking they could live like this. That this could go on forever and ever. That she’d be warmed by his fire until they were old and they danced together on memories of the times they used to have.

Then summer ends and the frost creeps back in.

The Georgian house is still lovely. She still loves the colours on the walls they bickered over and splashed on one another when they were painting. She still loves the furniture and the way he runs his hands over the older oak pieces, a fond look on his face. She still loves the throws, the cushions, the lamps and her knick-knacks that make her think _home_ for the first time in years.

She hates when he stares into the distance with his eyes as icy as the day she met him.

Madeleine is ashamed to say she doesn’t know when it starts. She’s in a dream. She doesn’t have to notice things like emotional scarring and post-traumatic stress anymore. Then again, she didn’t spend all those years studying psychology to miss the signs. Some things are ingrained; just like the chill of a gun in her palm and the crack of the bullet leaving its chamber.

Sometimes she swears his fingertips are just that bit colder and that distinctive, demented crack sharpens the edge of his voice. It lingers around him in the evenings. He holds her a little bit tighter when she approaches him. He breathes into her shoulder like he’d been drowning; deep, desperate, gulping breaths. She never leaves him in the evenings. He just squeezes her closer.

Sometimes she can feel the chill in her own fingers. It creeps in with the nightmares and the panic that tear her from sleep with shaking limbs and tears encroaching in the corners of her eyes. She quivers, trapped in a prison of gunshots, blood and that damn not knowing. He reaches for her in the dark. His fire thaws her as he wraps up her hands in his, peppering delicate kisses along her knuckles. Then she’s in his arms and warm, content and safe. The gunshots fade, the blood dries, the not knowing doesn’t matter. Because if she did know she might have to push him away and she could no sooner push away her own soul. He never leaves her at night. She curls into him and lets him cover her like a blanket.

The woman she was in Switzerland would have laughed at her; how could her happiness depend on some man with a hazy past and even hazier morals? But that woman in Switzerland had forgotten what it was like to have someone with her through the nightmares and the pain. Someone who she didn’t have to hide from. Madeleine in Switzerland had been pushing everything into a vault in the corner of her mind. Madeleine with the nice Georgian house and the world at her feet had opened that vault and felt her mind swirl and crumble and reform. The new Madeleine would not be so easily shattered as the old. Not once she has healed anew. She would be a phoenix, rising from the flames, lit with the spark of a man with ice in his eyes.

Though nights and evenings seem set in stone, the days turn on their heads. Some days are stifling. Some days she can’t look in his eyes without hearing the shot that killed her father in her ears. Some days he seems far away, doesn’t wash, refuses glasses of water and throws hers down the sink as if it will swallow her up. Some days there’s a horrible tightness in the air and Madeleine feels her breath stolen from her by his presence.

On those days, they part when they leave the house. Madeleine wanders to the parks and basks in the quiet hum of life around her. The gunshots are replaced with laughter and chatter. The bile in her mouth is replaced with the tea the cafe owner sets on the counter when she approaches. On the days it rains, she sits inside and listens to the cheery pop music from the cafe’s radio. She watches the drizzle or the torrential rain (and everything in between) and watches it wash everything clean. She pretends it’s doing the same to her. On the days it’s (miraculously) sunny, she sits on one of the seats outdoors and watches normal people do normal things with normal worries and normal schedules. Their obliviousness to the world she was dragged up in is comforting in its naivety. She thinks maybe everything she’s done, everything James has done, in the name of peace or _Queen and Country_ or whatever hasn’t been for nought.

“Some of us have to be in the shadows so others don’t have to,” James had said one evening when he’d felt like talking, a memory dancing behind his glazed over irises. On those days, she understands what he meant.

On those days she doesn’t know where James goes. Oh, she can guess. She’s not stupid. There’s alcohol, smoke and lies on his breath. He tucks money into his pocket when he leaves and doesn’t pull any out again when he comes home. Sometimes she smells something that could be either perfume or cologne on his clothes. It’s not theirs. But his clothes are always immaculate. He never stays away more than a few hours and she knows what he looks like rumpled and sated anyway. She thanks whatever deity there is for any small mercies she gets regarding him; he’s faithful at least.

He slowly gets more restless. First, it’s just a jiggling knee under a restaurant table or the drum of fingers on the kitchen counter. Then there are the covert glances over shoulders, the staring at reflections in shop fronts. They’ve always walked within touching distance, but now there’s an alertness when he tracks her movements as if he’s ready to yank her to him and run.

When he starts secreting guns on his person again, some part of her is disappointed. He’d chosen her. He’d turned his back on M and everything he stood for. The guns, the blood, the violence. When she finds a gun disassembled on her coffee table, accusations fly out of her mouth like the bullets he’s so fond of. She rages and breaks and reforms, while he stares at her. There’s remorse in his gaze, but a kind of defiance too. He won’t stop. He won’t let this go. She turns her back on him and doesn’t speak for the rest of the evening. When he crawls into bed and curls up to her like he’s lost she almost feels sorry.

Almost.

She wakes up before him the next morning. Watching him in profile as he sleeps, slithers of lazy light peek through the curtains and caress the planes his face like she did. She’s glad her tears are silent as her naivety crushes her. She should have known a man like James Bond couldn’t just throw his gun off a bridge.

She slithers out of bed and curls into one of their plush armchairs. Staring out of the glass as the rain drums against the bay windows, she sits and wonders when it came to this.


End file.
